The Magazine of the American Society of Landscape Architects

ARONSON: OLIVE TREES AND OTHER SECRETS

It seems not much could rattle Shlomo Aronson, considering how much great landscape architecture work he has done in Israel, where the cultural sensitivities stack up well out of proportion to the country’s small size. In this new oral history filmed by The Cultural Landscape Foundation, Aronson, who is 76, talks about his life, times, and designs, including his work in Jerusalem with his friend and mentor Lawrence Halprin. Many of his works navigate the tricky shoals of history on complex ground. Yet sometimes the answers are amusingly straightforward. “Every place where you don’t know what to do, you put an olive tree,” Aronson says. “It’s an obvious solution to me. It’s indigenous. It’s from here. And you don’t have to argue about it…both communities, Jews and Arabs, love this thing.” In the excerpt above, Shlomo talks about his work on the Suzanne Dellal Dance and Theater Center in Tel Aviv.